Tag: looff carousel

Current building code allows for buildings along Spokane Falls Boulevard with roughly this “maximum building envelope”––in other words, the largest a building can possibly be built on these sites. (PHOTO: City of Spokane)

In the early 1970s, in the lead-up to Expo 74, civic leaders in Spokane decided to make a major change to downtown. In addition to relocating the railyards off of what became Riverfront Park, business groups and planners demolished broad swaths of heritage buildings on West Trent, then Spokane’s “skid row.” To distance the area from its seedy past, the street running through it was renamed “Spokane Falls Boulevard.” The short-term vision was to provide an ample amount of parking for the swarms of regional and international visitors who would soon descend on downtown, with future opportunities on the sites to be determined. Naturally, these plans never materialized.

A possible rendering of Riverfront Park’s iconic U.S. Pavilion, part of the legacy of Expo 74, with a new high-tech domed structure underneath the cables. (PHOTO: Olson Kundig Architects/Spokane Journal of Business)

New renderings were unveiled Friday illustrating a possible future for Riverfront Park. Under this scenario, the U.S. Pavilion, the most iconic piece of the legacy of Spokane’s World’s Fair in 1974, would be extensively remodeled with a new night-lit superstructure underneath the cables. This is in stark contrast to the last plan we heard, which would have recovered the entire pavilion with a new type of durable teflon-coated fiberglass.

Also released were images of a potential new building for the Looff Carousel (which nicely matches the style Fountain Cafe, built in 2013, while more than doubling the square footage) and for a world-class climbing gym that has been proposed by a private developer for the North Bank. It’s anticipated that a bond measure will be brought to voters in November to pay for these improvements.

We won’t lie: the Riverfront Park plans, combined with Walt Worthy’s Convention Center Hotel and the remodeling of the Bennett Block and the former Huppin’s Building, promise to do more for Spokane than anyone realizes. The next few years are set to bring a lot of positive change to downtown, and we’re so excited to be sharing it with you.